In this week’s episode of the #BeetCast we explore the topic through the initiatives of the Publicis Groupe and the Spark Foundry agency. Our guest is Jason Smith, President, Diversified Investments at Spark Foundry, a unit of Publicis Media.
Jason is twenty-year veteran of the agency world with time as Horizon and Mindshare. He joined Spark Foundry earlier this year in a newly created role
In our chat, he speaks to the imperative of media investment around the increasingly diverse U.S. consumer population. He says one of the barriers to investment is the under representation of diverse groups in panels and other audience planning measurement methodologies.
This is a very open and direct on the need and outlook of real change in the advertising business.
Great conversation. Thank you Jason.
And thanks to our sponsor Mediaocean for supporting this podcast.
And thank you for listening!
]]>Lance has a fascinating background as a veteran media agency executive at Omnicom and in recent years, as a pioneering entrepreneur.
He is the co-founder of 4C Insights. Last year, the company was sold to Mediaocean where he now serves as president.
Why the name 4C? Lance explains it was the luck of airline upgrade to business class which put him in seat 4C, next to Alok Choudhary, the renowned computer scientist from Northwestern. They hit it off and the rest is history.
Great conversation with Lance about leadership, innovation, omni-channel marketing, and his personal commitment to music education for all kids.
Special thanks to Lance and the Mediaocean crew for being the sponsor of this new season of the BeetCast. I am super grateful to your longstanding support.
And thanks for listening. Hope you enjoy the episode.
]]>With the acquisition of 4C last year, Mediaocean has become a cross platform player, expanding beyond its roots to planning, optimization and measurement.
These are some of the conversations in this podcast with Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise and guest host Matt Spiegel, EVP of Transunion and head of its fast growing media vertical.
Bill and Matt take a deep dive around the challenges of interoperability among digital platforms and TV, measurement vs. currency, the needs for identity, and the right balance between efficiency versus price. Lots covered here.
Thanks Matt and Bill. Great conversation.
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a Transunion company.
]]>So Mediaocean, whose software helps advertisers automate their operations, is launching new tools to bring further efficiencies to what it says is still a highly manual process.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mediaocean’s Drew Kane explains the rationale.
In November, Mediaocean announced two new tools for local TV buying will be added to its Spectra and Prisma software suites:
“Local (ad sales) is a highly specialised process,” Kane says.
“The folks that are working in local are experts at their craft. There is no luxury to be bogged down in performing manual processes.
“We are automating steps that have classically been repeated in a very manual way, so that we can make room for the artists of their craft to light up the canvas up with art.”
In the COVID-19 pandemic, many ad industry execs have been saying that the prevalence of home-bound customers has forced national advertisers to think like local advertisers.
Local TV news has been the most consumed content, according to Nielsen.
For Kane, however, that is no longer just about a traditional cable TV news feed.
“We’re no longer in a world where it’s (just about) local linear,” he says.
“You still have local execution, you still have national execution … but we need to be able to enable it all in a converged manner.”
Mediaocean, whose roots go back to the 1960s with Donovan Systems, has been aggressive about buying software companies that CEO Bill Wise has described as “mini Mediaoceans” in other markets.
The company acquired marketing technology firm 4C Insights, whose focus is on audience data, media planning and analytics for streaming video and social networks.
Other acquisitions include MBS and Symsys to expand into Europe, and PIN Systems and BCC AdSystems to push into the Asia-Pacific region.
]]>Kantar has been collaborating with the ANA to “make sense of all the changes that are happening at marketing organizations” around the world and come up with “some real levers that they can pull that we know have effect and go beyond somebody’s view of what works but actually is data-backed,” says the CMO of Kantar Consulting, Marc de Swaan Arons.
Marketing2020 is led by Kantar Vermeer in partnership with the ANA, Spencer Stuart, Forbes, MetrixLab and Adobe, as well as the World Federation of Advertisers and its organizations in China, Brazil, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey, and France.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Arons talks about the impact of changes in consumer behavior and media fragmentation. “What we’re seeing is that there is growth, but it’s moving to very uncomfortable places for most of the established players,” he says.
Within consumer packaged-goods, known as FMCG in Europe, 90% of the growth over the last five years “has actually been driven by people outside the top 25. In other words, there is growth but it’s being pulled in by other players.”
Big, established companies are finding that their traditional models for marketing and sales are much less relevant in a world where consumers are choosing very personalized solutions and media is fragmenting, according to Arons.
“Our program is a research study that aims to give marketing and business leaders real practical tools” by January of 2019. The study will explain how growth over-performers differ in how they define growth “but also how they build growth strategy, organize for growth and how they build the new capabilities and combine those with the traditional capabilities of marketing and business.”
Early insight from 50 of about 500 interviews with business executives that will be conducted worldwide shows an evolving role for marketing. In the past it was the brand captain. Over the last few years, marketing “evolved into a role of almost the purpose coach, the marketing coach within the organization. Bringing alive the brand purpose, delivering solutions to consumers.
“We see a next step, which is really required, is for the marketers to evolve into the mindset of business owners. It’s all about now what drives growth in a business sense. What drives bottom and topline growth. What drives personal growth for your staff and how do we recruit the best people. It’s much more of an owner mindset.”
By moving from captain to coach to owner, “that’s when you have the invitation in the boardroom to really be a peer. If marketers are seen to be playing with brands with different metrics rather than the hard business metrics that everybody else on the board works with, they’re not part of the team and they’re not part of driving real growth strategy,” says Arons.
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>Nielsen is about to launch its marketing cloud services in Israel and Australia, where the company is a data provider to joint industry committees for currency measurement services.
“Essentially, in Australia it’s very hard for any marketer who’s looking to make some decisions and who’s looking for the transparency that they need for those decisions to not bump into Nielsen data in every single step of their process,” Petra says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
In Hong Kong, Petra cites the example of a broadcaster whose assets span print, online, offline and addressable that wanted a total audience solution.
“What we’ve really done is we’ve taken every data asset we have, from the TV audience measurement and online census measurement, we do mobile measurement, Homescan panel and added that to the broadcaster’s OTT and subscriber data,” she says.
“But I think what’s really amazing about the Hong Kong project is that the broadcaster is actually now inviting marketers to actually onboard their data too. And so they really are powering an ecosystem of complete transparency with advanced segments defined by the marketers planned on, forecast on and eventually paid for.”
Outside of the U.S., in many instances markets are organized either through “very formal joint industry committees or, at the very least, through technical committees that we liaise with,” Petra adds.
“We work very closely with these joint industry committees and technical committees, to define standards, to report back on our performance against those standards. And so we really work on the presumption that the marketer is guaranteed of quality because the entire industry has bought into the common standard and common currency that we’re producing.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>Garbaccio, EVP, Advertiser Direct & Marketing Cloud, is working with Sony Crackle and much of its connected TV inventory to better monetize it with addressable programmatic targeting. Nielsen and other data are used to transact on media that’s owned and operated or exclusively operated by Crackle.
“What we see the DMP as really is connective tissue between data assets and measurement assets, with the brands being directly in the middle,” Garbaccio says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “If you want that connective tissue to work and to be valuable for the brand, you need the best data that exists. Transaction-based data, census-based, owned and operated exclusively through Nielsen, and you need to be able to then activate and measure that.”
Advertisers will now be able to reach specific audiences across Sony Crackle content as well as the Sony Crackle Plus Network, including Funimation and Sony Pictures Television Mobile Games. With Nielsen AI, Sony Pictures Television will be able to optimize addressable audiences based on real-time changes in consumer behavior on behalf of its clients, according to a news release announcing the deal between Sony and Nielsen Marketing Cloud.
The Nielsen DMP “allows you to see the data but then also see it as the campaigns run, and get closed-loop feedback. That feedback allows you then to measure and optimize those campaigns. So it’s really an end-to-end cycle that really our DMP allows us to do,” says Garbaccio.
His way of simplifying the semantics of what constitutes connected-TV or OTT viewing is to view it simply as media. “It’s a new, different type of media just like mobile was, back in the day display, and even linear TV. We’re not there yet, but I want a world of when you create audiences, whether with first or third party data, and push them out for targeting or activation.”
It should be viewed as “one centralized ID that can be across all media. So we see connected TV or over the top television as no different,” Garbaccio adds. “It’s just right now is very early, the scale is not there like it is potentially in linear TV or even mobile. But we think that it’s going to be there and you need that underlying ID and that technology in order to make any of those things happen.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>That may or may not be true, depending on your persuasion. But a 2018 intervention by new blockchain technology could at least improve the quality of agencies’ lives in the foreseeable future.
That was the hope of one big-brand marketer, excited about the prospect for how the infrastructure which underpins crypto-currency could bring a step-change in transparency to the advertising business, speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV.
The panelists were all members of “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, announced by IBM and Mediaocean at the Cannes Lions festival:
The theory goes that a blockchain – in this case, one powered by IBM’s existing open-source Hyperledger infrastructure and plugged in to technology from Mediaocean, which processes $140 billion dollars of ad spend on an annual basis – should enable traceability for how every fraction of a cent gets decided, apportioned and siphoned off in the ad supply chain. Pfizer and Kellogg are also members of the consortium.
Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics Josh Herman:
“My expectation is that it will be a quality of life improvement. The ease with which you can defend the spend improves your quality of life. The extent to which you have confidence about the numbers that you’re putting in front of the meeting to make actual business decision, improves your quality of life.”
Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise:
“A lot of companies who have fraud running through their businesses. I think we all, as an ecosystem, want to clean that up.
“Our agency partners who are forward-leaning and run transparent businesses are pushing for this. They also want to be involved. We announced the marketers (first) because, at the end of the day, it’s your guys’ money, but the ad agencies are going to also be big participants in the pilot as well and we’re working very collaboratively with them.”
Unilever global media VP Rob Master:
“We spend so much time now around the reconciliation, around massaging the data, trying to track down the data, waiting for things to come in before we can actually spend our full amount of money.
“(Blockchain) allows us to actually spend more time thinking about the consumer.”
IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah:
“We think about this initiative, in baseball terms, as the very first inning. We want to be able to show transparency of the money. The second piece is the speed of reconciliation. Lastly, if we can show any amount of improvement in that percentage of money that gets (ad-)taxed … I think that would be considered a great success.”
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>“They are looking to us as change agents, as transformation stewards, to help them do that because they realize that it’s very difficult changing their own organization sometimes,” Ankeney says in this interview at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“And sometimes it’s actually easier to do it through the partnership with and the lens of an outside media agency partner. No place like Cannes to inspire that sort of thinking and conversations.”
Being accountable to clients’ business outcomes is “a huge challenge,” but having made transparency and data two priorities has paid admirable dividends to Havas as measured by account wins, according to Ankeney.
“For us, we focus on the meaningful data and the meaningful data is what we hold ourselves accountable to. It’s what supports the business challenges and business objectives of every client and that enables us focus on being accountable to our clients.”
Sometimes it’s a matter of leading clients to transformation. “They know they want it, they know they need it, they know that there’s concern there. Sometimes they need us to help them understand it.”
Others are “very advanced and very knowledgeable and they are pushing us, demanding from us that same thing. Luckily we’re of like minds when we get there so it’s a very easy conversation for us to have.”
With a background at such agencies as J. Walter Thompson, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Carmichael Lynch, Doner and Initiative, Ankeney has roots on the creative side but is more than happy to be engrossed in media.
“I love more focus on media because it means our role is becoming more meaningful with our clients and we can have more meaningful partnerships and relationships with our clients,” he says. “Whether it’s accountability or transformation or you name it, the more focus on media the better as far as I’m concerned.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>“Transparency is unquestionably the table stakes at this point,” O’Grady says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“It’s a lot more than viewability, it’s a lot more than preventing fraud. Everybody along the supply chain is responsible for transparency. I really think we’ve hit a tipping point where everybody is acknowledging that we’re all collectively responsible.”
He feels that Nielsen is in a unique position because its data offerings combine television ratings, digital ad ratings and purchase insights from consumer shopping panels. For marketers, everything should add up to top quality in both data and match rates.
“If it isn’t, you just have to acknowledge and be transparent with what can work and what does work. The responsibility is across the whole supply chain,” O’Grady says.
Cross-screen measurement and cross-screen access to advertisers has changed dramatically, he adds.
“I really think we’re at an inflection point for TV or TV content, premium video content, we can measure it. We have a holistic means to measure the impact across all these different channels and then add it up.”
O’Grady considers blockchain technology for advertising and media to “potentially be a very valuable tool” whose true utility remains to be proven. “It’s just not known yet.”
One key promise of blockchain is the security of data that blockchain participants agree to share. “I think there’s great promise there. But it’s very early stages.”
O’Grady likens the industry’s interest in blockchain to artificial intelligence and virtual reality “and I’ve yet to see an application for the advertising ecosystem that’s truly made an impact. Maybe on the creative side it has.
“But if blockchain’s really going to manage or improve that work stream, particularly in the programmatic space, there’s great need for improvement.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>His take on the media supply chain strikes a familiar and recurring refrain. “When you think about all the people that touch that food chain, we’ve got to get to a much better place in terms of performance metrics and transparency,” Koenigsberg says.
He defines transparency as “all sides sharing information. If we can get to the that place, I believe that the seller community, the publishers, the linear TV suppliers, the other platforms will end up all working toward business outcome solutions for clients.”
Koenigsberg differs from many in advertising and media who have been advocating for a uniform way to measure campaigns across media and platforms. He envisions a far more fluid landscape.
“You may end up having 100 different metrics, all these different KPI’s, but that’s fine. I think AI will help that. And if we can move in that direction, that’s where the world needs to go. That’s where the business needs to go.”
After building Horizon for the past 29 years based on an integrated business service model rather than the a la carte offerings of the biggest holding companies, Koeingsberg’s creation is now ranked #2 in the U.S. in terms of scale. However, with the rise of digital media, scale isn’t the be-all-end-all it was touted to be a decade or so ago.
“I’d rather be ranked in terms of being best in general as opposed to scale, because I don’t think scale says it all,” he says.
He ticks off a list of holding company legacy shortcomings and figures that the model he chose happens to be “the model of today.” But he’s not fully satisfied.
While being consistent has helped, “If anybody thinks that once they’ve reached that plateau they can rest on their laurels, that’s the time to change. We are relooking at our whole structure today.”
If he were to start from scratch, he’d want even more integration. “I believe that our teams should be led by business solution experts. I believe that the business solution expert should own everything. Content, data analytics, insights, tactical planning, data analysis with one cohesive integrated group.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>As Masters Circle was being established in the U.S., the ANA “started to recognize fundamental flaws in the way we manage ourselves,” says the organization’s CEO, Bob Liodice. “We’ve lost sight of being able to pursue brand and creative excellence. We’ve lost sight of our efficiency and our infrastructure,” Liodice says in this interview with Beet.TV.
The 12 pillars of the Masters Circle are based in large part by the fact that about half of all Fortune 500 companies have declining revenues and after-tax profits, according to Liodice.
“We can interpret that lots of ways. But in many ways, it’s an indictment on our marketing system. It could be one of the reasons why CMO tenure is as short as it is.”
The 12 pillars of Masters Circle are:
Advocacy; Brand and creative excellence; Brand safety; Digital media supply chain; Future growth; Gender equality; Inclusiveness; Measurement; Media transparency; Organizing; Purpose; and Talent development.
“To be a transformative force, you have to focus in on the one or two significant issues perhaps in all of the areas and attempt to make a difference with them,” Liodice says.
He cites as an example the joint effort by the ANA, 4A’s and IAB to combat digital advertising fraud under the auspices of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG).
“What we needed to do was create an institutional presence that allowed for confidence to grow in the entire digital supply chain that we could attack fraud at its roots.”
As a result, research has indicated that ads that go through the TAG certification process show an 84% improvement in fraud rates versus the general market.
“That’s the type of progress we’re looking to make,” says Liodice.
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>But a panel of industry executives convened by Beet.TV debated how blockchain technology could usher in a new era of transparency that could unblock this bottleneck.
The panelists were all members of “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, announced by IBM and Mediaocean at the Cannes Lions festival:
A blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin – but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary.
Pfizer and Kellogg are also members of what IBM calls a “consortium”. Details of how that group will operate are not clear, but the theory goes that a blockchain – in this case, one powered by IBM’s existing open-source Hyperledger infrastructure and plugged in to technology from Mediaocean, which mediates trades between buyers and sellers – should enable traceability for how every fraction of a cent gets decided, apportioned and siphoned off in the ad supply chain.
Moderating, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell said the analyst firm estimated fraud and non-viewable impression wastage at $7.4 billion in 2016, projected to rise. She asked the panel how blockchain will benefit…
Unilever global media VP Rob Master:
“There is a lot of darkness and the lack of transparency and accountability. Are we serving (ads) to actual human beings and not bots? Are people actually able to see our advertising?
“This MVP (minimum viable product) with IBM and the promise of blockchain – actually, really at an exponential pace – scale the opportunity to really clean things up and provide a much cleaner digital ecosystem.”
Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics Josh Herman|:
“There’s been a little opacity as the industry matured and grew up – (there are) logical reasons, as the CMO has to traipse across the Lumascape and figure out how to put the Lego blocks (of software) together. You can only have complexity as a result.
“As a company (like ours) that’s 145 years old, you only have the right to survive or thrive if you either invent transformational technology or identify transformational technology that will allow you continue evolving. And so blockchain is one of those transformational technologies”
Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise
“This blockchain solution is actually going to be across all media – TV, print, radio, out-of-home, all forms of digital – because all media eventually is going to be connected through an IP address. So the plumbing for linear or traditional media is going to look more like digital.
“We think that’s why this solution is not a Mediaocean solution or an IBM solution. It’s an industry solution that we all need to prosper.”
IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah:
“The great thing about what blockchain will do and what transparency provides is, you can figure out who the good guys are and you can figure out who the bad guys are. What we’re doing is setting up the underlying technology to be able to allow everyone to know what’s going on.
“There’s always going to be new issues that arise with transparency. We will catch those issues as they arise, or shortly thereafter”
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>“I think we’re moving into a stage where brand safety will become a commodity. Within a year or two years time, marketers simply won’t buy from publishers who don’t guarantee them brand safe inventory,” says John Montgomery, Global EVP, Brand Safety, GroupM. “And that’s going to be table stakes for vendors.”
This year and next, GroupM will be focusing on compliance, Montgomery explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“But also we’ve tried to take the brand safety conversation from limiting risk onto another level now. What we’ve found is because of the way we buy, from mainly premium publishers and in a brand-safe environment, not only are we limiting clients’ risk but the ads are working better.”
So Montgomery is trying to convince GroupM clients and the advertising community as a whole that by buying better quality, “maybe the CPM’s will not be that low or they’ll be slighter higher than they are at the moment, but it will be worth it.”
GroupM has done studies in various countries “proving that brand safety not only limits risk but it works better. Buying quality actually sells. This is where we think we should take the conversation to after brand safety becomes kind of table stakes.”
With the European Union having a month ago instituted the General Data Protection Regulation for consumers, Montgomery says it’s had a heavy impact not just in Europe but around the world.
“Particularly Google and Facebook’s decision to limit access to measurability and, in some cases, access to brand safety tags. We’re still assessing the impact of that, but certainly we have more limited programmatic now.”
Although the scandal in which Facebook user data was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica has made the marketing community “sit up and be concerned about consumer reputation and respect for consumer data,” it doesn’t seem to have negatively impact use of Facebook, according to Montgomery.
“I don’t think consumers are as concerned as we may think in the marketing community, which is good news because it gives us time to act and respect consumer data.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>So the Festival is still a “very important watering hole,” says Millard. In this interview with Beet.TV, Millard says data, diversity and consultants encroaching on the agency space were three main topics of discussion.
Millard is perhaps closer to the year-to-year center of gravity of Cannes than most people because Ascential plc, which owns the Festival, acquired MediaLink just over a year ago. MediaLink and its executives have long been fixtures at Cannes.
“I think what is absolutely palpable is the number of agency execs who are not here this year,” she says. “The conversations this year are more on the gravitas side. In years past, we focused on a lot of what isn’t working at all. This year, I find the conversations about we can do for the industry, for society at large.”
She feels that the Festival listened to the feedback it received from attendees leading up to last year’s event and that its subsequent modifications have been positive.
“It feels a little bit different and I do think that part of that is Cannes Lions’ response to a number of different constituents who said, ‘hey we’re looking for a little bit different experience here at Cannes.’ I think cutting it down by a day was a very, very smart, important response to it.”
Contributing to the “different feel” this year are “perhaps a little less frivolity and subjects with a little bit more gravitas.”
On the much-discussed subject of the utility of data, Millard cites the recognition by brands that “their data needs to be owned by them and better understood perhaps than in the past.”
There was more of a focus on equality and diversity this year, “not just in our business, but in our world. That will continue. That’s very much here to say.”
The third major conversation revolved around “the classic consultants encroaching on the previously owned relationships that agencies have with the brand marketers,” says Millard.
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>“The digital ecosystem is fraught I think, as we’ve all seen with a host of challenges,” says the VP of Global Media. “We believe that the blockchain is a potential opportunity to help give us a better understanding of how the whole ecosystem works and really empowers us to make better business decisions as we go forward.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Master talks about Unilever’s efforts to monitor ad viewability, weed out non-human traffic and seek brand-safe environments. “There’s a host of things in that ecosystem that we’re tracking,” he says.
He’s hoping blockchain will provide a more efficient and effective way to manage and monitor the whole process.
“It really starts with us as the advertiser with that dollar, and how much of that dollar is actually spent showing our great creative to the consumer. Where along the way are we spending that dollar to make sure it gets to the consumer in an appropriate way?”
Given the circuitous route that “a great piece of creative” can take on its way to a publisher and, ultimately, an audience, “Along the way I think there’s a lot of different things that have to take place to make sure it’s seen by humans.”
Gaining a better understanding of how the amount money invested with various publishers and platforms actually performs will help Unilever determine which ones are most valuable. “And it allows us to prioritize our dollars,” says Master.
“We spend a dollar and a host of things have to take place to understand how that dollar’s being spent. If we could do it much more efficiently and effectively, we could understand much quicker what’s working and what’s not.”
As it stands, it’s not uncommon to be waiting “waiting weeks or months to understand what was spent, whether it was seen. In a potential blockchain solution, we could do it in a matter of hours or days and the efficiency of our spend becomes that much better.”
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>“Accountability in marketing to me means growth. Ultimately, I think marketing are the growth architects of the business. Every thing we do should inspire, lead and shape towards that growth vision,” Wakely adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Being a self-described “evidence-based marketer,” the company has made it “a bit of a life mission to identify what are the key levers of growth at Mars,” says Wakely, who expects her marketing teams to be “enterprise-wide leaders and to really influence the growth agenda at the board.”
Having consulted with Wharton and other institutions, Mars did a deep dive on what makes some 50 global product categories grow, along with the brands within them, according to Wakely, who spent several years at Procter & Gamble before joining Mars in 2001.
“And from that we’ve tried to distill a very clear philosophy of growth, which of course advertising plays a big part in, but it’s certainly not the only lever for growth,” Wakely explains.
The company codified its resulting “Laws of Growth” philosophy into an operating model that identifies “all the key levers we think that grow categories, that grow our brands, and our whole business now cross-functionally is geared toward driving into that operating model for growth.”
Asked about established brands versus startups, Wakely dismisses provocative headlines proclaiming, among other things, the death of big brands or the demise of mass advertising.
“The question we asked ourselves as an evidence-based marketing company is what is real, changing dynamics in the marketplace that we need to address and what is hashtag fake news,” she says.
Having analyzed its 20 top markets and 35 categories, Mars found on average that about 50% of category growth is being driven still by big-scale brands and the other 50% by small, more disruptive players.
“That is a dynamic we need to respond to. But what I would say is that big brands are certainly not dead. There are big brands that are winning and there are big brands that are losing.
“To win, we really have to harness what we know drives growth. Mass penetration, mass reach, mass distribution. But we also have to be very agile and innovative to respond to the new digital age.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>“We have GRP’s, we have declining linear audiences around 18-34 and we have the unreachables that are on non- ad-supported platforms or non-measured platforms,” says Fiona Carter, Chief Brand Officer, AT&T Communications. “So what are we going to do about that? How are we going to move to an all-screen measurement that works across all of the networks, all of the digital players?”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Carter applauds the coalescence of competitors joining forces to facilitate not only reach and engagement with audiences but also the ability to measure the ROI of those engagements.
“In the end, although we’re very keen on brand building and we’re very keen on measuring how well our brand engages with our audience, we’re also here to sell at the end of the day,” Carter says. “And so trying to get the ROI out of everything we do so that we can prove we’re an investment and not a cost I think is an ultimate goal for a CMO.”
Among the offerings at Cannes, she identifies artificial intelligence from IBM, Quantcast and others as “one of the most fascinating conversations here at Cannes.” She echoes the desire to harness AI to improve marketing while wondering about its impact on advertising creativity. “Can they coexist? Can machine learning actually inspire greater creativity or will it be the end of creativity as we know it.?”
Asked for her thoughts on blockchain technology, Carter says AT&T is “doing a lot on blockchain” while noting that “everyone understands the murkiness of the digital advertising ecosystem. As a marketer, I feel many of us have been asleep at the wheel in understanding when our budget goes in through our agencies how much comes out to meet the publishers and eventually the consumers.”
She praises “these companies that are trying to help us work out the tradeoff of all of these service taxes and tolls and what the value is ultimately and frankly what the real price of operating in the programmatic supply chain should be.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>“What blockchain does is create a single ledger that everyone trusts,” says Vedant Sampath, CTO of software and computing services provider Mediaocean, which is teaming with IBM’s iX agency on a blockchain consortium solution. Uniting some of the world’s largest advertisers, agencies and publishers—including Kellogg, Kimberly-Clark, Pfizer, Unilever and IBM Watson Advertising—the solution aims to provide transparency and build trust and accountability in the advertising ecosystem.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Sampath provides a before and after look at media transactions and explains what blockchain brings to the table.
“So if you look at the media supply chain, the value chain consists of the advertiser, the agency, the suppliers and all of the adtech players. All of these are multiparty transactions, meaning from a marketer standpoint that money is being spent by multiple players involved in the process,” Sampath says.
Without access to a blockchain, “everyone puts that information into their own ledgers. And when it comes time to reconcile, they take the invoice and compare it against their ledger. And this happens multiple times across all of the parties.”
This is where the single ledger comes in. “So where previously you trusted your ledger, now you trust the common ledger,” says Sampath. “So everyone has all of their transactions in one place. Reconciliation in that context becomes a lot easier.”
When an agency sends a media plan to its client, the marketer approves it and generates a purchase order, which has terms and conditions. “That gets written to the blockchain.” Campaigns are then generated, with spending across a number of different media suppliers.
“There are insertion orders, or if it’s a programmatic buy there may be a DSP where you’re sending the buy. All of those have terms and conditions. We capture that in the blockchain. And then when the invoice comes in and the payments happen, all of those are captured.”
Via the blockchain’s application programming interfaces, any players in the ecosystem can integrated into the blockchain and updated with the transactions that sit in their systems. The users have consoles that they can look at to roll up the data.
“Today, when there’s an order we update our internal ledger. But in the new world we’ll be updating the blockchain ledger, the distributed ledger. It will be transparent to the end user,” says Sampath.
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>“It’s going to rise all tides,” says Wise.
However, some of the boats navigating those tides might be looking at rough waters ahead. “If your business is reliant on margins that are above market value or if there’s fraud being laced within your ad exchange or SSP, then obviously it will hurt your business,” he adds.
It’s okay for the margins of adtech companies to decline in a more efficient and transparent market if the end return outweighs that decline, according to Wise.
“So if your margin goes down ten or twenty or thirty percent but the business opportunity is ten to twenty X, that’s a tradeoff I think everyone would make and I think that’s the opportunity here.”
He cites three main goals of the blockchain consortium: more transparency, interoperability with other blockchain solutions and faster invoice reconciliation.
“A lot of marketers didn’t know how much adtech tax, if you will, they were spending and how much was going to working media. And when they saw that in digital programmatic it can be as high as sixty to sixty five cents on the dollar, they were blown away. So the first thing we’re going to do is make all of that transparent, make the supply chain more transparent,” says Wise.
Interoperability with other blockchain solutions will yield improvements in supply chain management issues, plus problems like fraud and privacy.
As for reconciliation, “We’re going to be able to reconcile much quicker, which means the pipes are greased. We can pay quicker, we can invoice quicker.”
Wise calls the blockchain consortium the “natural evolution of Mediaocean,” whose systems handle some $140 billion in annual global ad spend. “It’s not about Mediaocean, it’s not about what happens to our business, it’s what happens to the industry,” he says.
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, company CEO Bill Wise says Mediaocean will be making a blockchain announcement in the next few months, though initial activity in entered on discussions with potential partners.
Whilst blockchain is best known as the technology infrastructure which powers the likes of Bitcoin, over the last year businesses of all kinds have explored the potential it offers to record every action and modification in a distributed ledger.
For advertising buyers and sellers, who, over the last couple of years, have been plagued by the creeping realisation that much of their money is siphoned off by intermediary platforms without full disclosure, that could be mana from heaven – blockchain shine a spotlight on every fraction of a cent that might be taken by links in the chain.
“For every dollar a marketer spends, anywhere from 30, 40 cents is going to the end consumer or publisher, which means that there is 60, 70 cents going to the middle in ad-tech tax and data costs,” Wise says. “I do believe blockchain can help solve major issues as it relates to supply chain management, and transparency.”
So, what would a blockchain for ad-tech look like? Wise sees “an immutable, distributed ledger that starts with an agency getting authorization from their client to spend media on their behalf”. Then “all of that flow that goes through, and including the entire supply chain to the end publishers, and being able to measure all that”.
Several vendors out there have already gone to market with bold claims for blockchain in advertising. Mediaocean appears to be taken a cautious and consensual approach.
Wise is convinced: “We can provide that level of transparency by converting our databases into a block chain.” But he says: “We’re talking to a lot of partners right now. We have a working demo. We’re talking to major marketers and their agencies about creating a consortium pilot, which we’re really excited about.”
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>“If all we do as an industry is make television look like digital programmatic today and the mess of the supply chain that exists out there, then we will fail,” says Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise. “We need to keep the economics of TV today and leverage the targeting and the data available for digital but we need to do it efficiently.”
Wise sees convergence “as not necessarily a buying problem but a planning and measurement problem” that it has sought to help remedy with internal solutions and partnerships with 4C Insights, VideoAmp and TubeMogul, among others, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
Since Mediaocean’s sale in August 2015 to a private equity company, it has made six acquisitions, expanded globally and expanded its customer base, 90% of which had been agencies. It now deals directly with CMO’s on a planning workflow solution called Lumina and with TV broadcasters and publishers through Prisma for Sellers.
“Planning and buying need to come together and buying and selling need to come together,” says Wise.
He notes that 4C has done “an amazing job of creating platforms” to plan, buy, measure and optimize all in one system, through advanced data, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“The tricky part is being able to respect what makes TV the most efficient media marketplace in the world today and it continues to be. While moving it into the digital future.” Wise thinks the next few years are going to be “very interesting to watch” in the measurement space.
“I think Nielsen has done a really, really good job of expanding their datasets to be more relevant in the digital age,” Wise says, adding that comScore “has actually created a nice, viable alternative.”
Others will follow as MVPD’s “are leaning into platforms like 4C and VideoAmp and potentially TubeMogul” to leverage set-top box viewing data “and what we’re seeing is the market is almost open to there being another player in that space.”
Then there is Oracle with its acquisitions of Datalogix and Moat. “We will evolve as the industry evolves,” Wise says.
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>With NBCU making its television inventory available via application programming interfaces, “it was pretty natural for us to come together,” says Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights.
Since its founding in 2011, 4C has brought data science together with workflow to facilitate smoother and more efficient media planning and buying, beginning with digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and LinkedIn. “We started doing that with social, but of course social is not the be all and end all,” Gupta says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we’re trying to get to is cross channels. TV of course is a big share of eyeballs.”
4C decided just over a year ago to expand beyond social, choosing linear TV as opposed to video. “In the TV case, some of the brands that we work with are bringing CRM data to linear TV, which hasn’t necessarily been done before.”
In a deal announced this month involving retailer Target, 4C has access to NBCU inventory “that is available to buy, let’s say, over the next couple of months. So therefore in the 4C planner you can plan a campaign and out comes a media schedule that says ‘here is how you want to allocate your budget to reach the goals that you have across the various programs on NBC,’” Gupta explains.
With the Mediaocean combination announced in September, 4C’s platform brings together inventory bought in both the Upfront and scatter markets. “It was very important that we cover both the use cases. We tap into the inventory, build an optimized plan and push that plan back into Mediaocean by integration.”
Gupta says that in the last six months or so, everyone is talking about applying “audience centricity” to linear television “and frankly television more broadly speaking. It’s the same thing that’s been done in digital advertising.”
Calling it the best parts of digital advertising now coming to linear TV, he welcomes the ongoing wave of buyers and sellers pushing the envelope of innovation.
“I think the people who are going to be successful down the road are the ones that are experimenting with these things now, getting the kinks out of the system, learning and then moving along,” Gupta says. “And I think next year you’re going to see a lot of the stuff happening at scale is my prediction.”
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>In this interview, our panelists discuss lingering fraud issues, vendor challenges and the multi-dimensional value of video…
Cross-platform brand safety
Brand safety on web may have been improved by software, but is still a problem on mobile and new platforms like connected TV, according to Integral Ad Science general manager Kevin Lenane.
“We can now measure viewability in in-app and mobile,” he said. “But there’s probably I would say generally less being done about brand safety on mobile and other things, you know, there’s fraud models on mobile now, too, but it’s definitely newer than web, and then if you look at connected TV, it’s wow, we have even less there.”
Vendor value
Many ad-tech vendors are taking too much and not providing enough value, according to FreeWheel’s agency VP James Rothwell.
“I think there’s a lot of extraction of value without actually the creation of value there,” he said. “So we need to find ways—better ways—of bringing the buyer and seller together to ensure that they are using partners all the way through that value chain.”
Video’s broad context
Video advertising can be valuable in its own right but can also provide a boost to other aspects of a marketing campaign, according to Mediaocean’s product VP Cordie DePascale.
“I’d look at TV, I’d look at video, I’d look at display, and I’d find ways to show that when I package it all up together in a certain way, they lift each other up,” he said. “We kind of have to get people comfortable with that idea and bring the comfort across from what they do in TV today.”
This panel was chaired by Furious Corp founder Ashley J. Swartz.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Mediaocean, whose software helps advertisers automate their operations, acquired INVISION, a peer whose technology helps TV companies do the same.
It was the fourth acquisition by Mediaocean since itself being acquired by Vista Equity Partners in August 2015. So, why did the New York-based company do the deal?
“We’re building converged future media systems,” Mediaocean partner management VP Cordie DePascale tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Everything we have done is about getting the buy and the sell side to work better in a converged ecosystem.
“We need to have sell-side solutions that can fit in with our strategy. Invasion was a company we saw fitting in to the strategy. Having the buy side’s great, we need to be able to talk to the sell side. Let’s acquire a company that has really great foothold in that direction.”
Mediaocean claims its software is used by 80,000 people across agencies, advertisers, broadcasters and publishers, powering some $125m in media spend. The move represents Mediaocean branching out to cater to both sides of the industry, and buying further in to TV workflow automation.
But DePascale says uniting the two sides in a common system doesn’t mean “gaming” anything – he says both constituencies deserve efficiencies.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
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